Thursday, June 21, 2012:
TaxSpanner, India’s largest and most trusted website for e-filing of income tax returns, today launched India’s first professional income tax course. Ankur Sharma, CEO, TaxSpanner.com says “With almost 4 crore income tax returns filed last year, and the number growing by 5-10% year on year, there is clearly a significant need for trained tax professionals in India. The government laws are also getting stricter with respect to income tax compliance. Through training and certifying Tax Return Professionals, TaxSpanner seeks to fill the resource gap to assist the ever growing population of taxpayers. The target, at present, is to train 25,000 Income Tax Return Professionals (ITRPs), each of whom will be capable of serving 100-500 taxpayers. At an average income of Rs. 1,000 per customer, an ITRP will be able to earn an additional amount of Rs 1 lakh to Rs 5 lakh in a year. To make this happen, professionals trained by TaxSpanner as per this curriculum will be preferred service providers for TaxSpanner marketplace.”
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The curriculum is a full-time 2 month course equivalent to 20 hrs. per week of coaching. It includes a 2 month guaranteed industrial training with TaxSpanner, during which those enrolled will be paid a stipend of Rs. 10,000 per month. The course also includes free usage worth Rs. 20,000 of TaxSpanner platforms for providing services like filing of ITR 1, ITR 2 and ITR 4, along with TaxOptimizer. The course fee is Rs. 25,000 for two months. The course will be available to students in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Pune. The typical candidates for this certification will be Commerce graduates and CA aspirants. The opportunity for a pool of such professionals is huge. An individual taxpayer spends between Rs. 250 to Rs. 5000 to get his/her tax return filed. Moreover, the taxpayer overpays an amount of Rs. 20,000 on an average due to inefficient tax optimization.
Additionally, assisted tax preparation remains very resilient due to the complexity of the Indian tax code and the value that tax professionals provide to clients. Assisted returns represent about 80 percent of total ITR filings. Chartered Accountants typically cater to companies or partnerships, and not to individuals.
Given the fast pace at which the company is growing, TaxSpanner is looking at assuring the provision of quality tax services in a standardized fashion. Though the course is online (exams may be conducted offline), various coaching institutions are tying up with TaxSpanner to use its curriculum to add to their existing certification courses.
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